Days of cold calling are numbered as customer segmentation takes off

The Merchants Global Contact Centre Benchmarking Report also indicated that this approach is growing with a further 35% of contact centres stating their intention to segment customers in the future. The report's findings are good news for consumers who have grown weary of indiscriminate cold calling tactics, and who have helped fuel recent US-based 'do-not-call' legislation where customers can choose to opt out from marketer's call lists.

Companies are beginning to personalise products or services for their high value customers. This year's report indicates that almost one in four (24%) respondents is using personalisation. And 36.5% of businesses plan to match different contact channels, such as the phone over email, against the potential value of different customer groups. A further 30% of centres surveyed stated that they also intended to follow this approach in the future. The financial services sector is leading the way as the greatest advocate of measuring customer lifetime metrics, with 70% currently using or intending to use.

The survey revealed that the vast majority of companies use voice, email, web, post and fax as key contact channels. However, given the popularity of text messaging, it is surprising that four in five companies are ignoring SMS and failing to integrate it as a core channel for customer interaction.

Mike Fairon, Chief Technology Officer (CTO) of Customer Interactive Solutions at Dimension Data, comments: "Although it may sound obvious, segmentation of customers can only succeed if organisations have their customer contact and segmentation strategies aligned with their data mining and analysis initiatives. When done well, personalisation should improve not only the uptake of specific offerings, but demonstrate to customers that businesses do listen and learn about their customers and meet their needs accordingly. Such an approach should not only drive revenues but help to retain customer loyalty.

"Our report shows that the days of cold calling should be on the decrease as undifferentiated customer service gives way to a more targeted proactive approach. However, the fact that only 19% of contact centres are using customer lifetime metrics to change the way they interact with their customers would demonstrate that many businesses are still getting the basic building blocks in place - creation of a single customer database, data integration, introduction of new channels and ensuring organisational alignment."

First published in the UK in 1996 by Merchants, European contact centre specialists and a subsidiary of Dimension Data, this year's edition is the sixth in a series of the industry-renowned benchmarking reports. The report has balanced global and industry representation from over 200 contact centres in 19 countries and five continents, and is an invaluable reference for all contact centre professionals. It provides managers with a set of benchmarks with which to measure their operations against, including contact centre staff salary levels, performance statistics, technology developments, CRM trends and training needs.